Absolution Gap (68 page)

“Good question,” Pietr said, “but not one likely to be answered any time soon. I’m afraid Saul Tempier is dead. He died seven years ago.”

“I’m sorry. I get the impression you liked him. But you said it yourself: he was getting old.”

“He was, but that didn’t have anything to do with his death. They found him electrocuted, killed while he was repairing one of his machines.”

“All right.” She hoped she did not sound too heartless. “Then he was getting careless.”

“Not Saul Tempier,” Pietr said. “He didn’t have a careless bone in his body. That was the bit they got wrong.”

Rashmika frowned. “They?”

“Whoever killed him,” he said.

They stood in silence for a while. The caravan surmounted the brow of the bridge, then began the long, shallow descent to the other side of the Rift. The far cliffs grew larger, the folds and seams of tortured geology becoming starkly obvious. To the left, on the south-western face of the Rift, Rashmika made out another winding ledge. It appeared to have been pencilled tentatively along the wall, a hesitant precursor for the proper job that was to follow. Yet that
was
the ledge. Very soon they would be on it, the crossing done. The bridge would have held, and all would be well with the world—or at least as well as when they had set out.

“Is that why you came here, in the end?” she asked Pietr. “To find out why they killed that old man?”

“That makes it sound like just another of your secular enquiries,” he replied.

“What is it, then, if it isn’t that?”

“I’d like to know why they murdered Saul, but more than that, I’d like to know why they feel the need to lie about the word of God.”

She had asked him about his beliefs already, but she still felt the need to probe the limits of his honesty. There had to be a chink, she thought: a crack of uncertainty in the shield of his faith. “So that’s what you believe the vanishings are?”

“As firmly as I believe anything.”

“In which case . . . if the true pattern of vanishings is different from the official story, then you believe that the true message is being suppressed, and the word of God isn’t being communicated to the people in its uncorrupted form.”

“Exactly.” He sounded very pleased with her, grateful that some vast chasm of understanding had now been spanned. She had the sense that a burden had been taken from him for the first time in ages. “And my mistake was to think I could silence those doubts by immersing myself in mindless observation. But it didn’t work. I saw you, standing there in all your fierce independence, and I realised I had to do this on my own.”

“That’s . . . something like the way I feel.”

“Tell me about your enquiry, Rashmika.”

She did. She told him about Harbin, and how she thought he had been taken away by one of the churches. More than likely, she said, he had been forcibly indoctrinated. This was not something she really wanted to consider, but the rational part of her could not ignore the possibility. She told him how the rest of her family had accepted Harbin’s faith some time ago, but that she had never been able to let him slip away that easily. “I had to do this,” she said. “I had to make this pilgrimage.”

“I thought you weren’t a pilgrim.”

“Slip of the tongue,” she said. But she wasn’t sure if she really meant it any more.

 

Ararat, 2675

 

The upper decks of the
Nostalgia for Infinity
were crammed with evacuees. Antoinette wanted to avoid thinking of them as so many cattle, but as soon as she hit the main cloying mass of bodies and found her own progress blocked or impeded, frustration overwhelmed her. They were human beings, she kept reminding herself, ordinary people caught up as she was in the ebb of events they barely comprehended. In other circumstances she could easily have been one of them, just as frightened and dazed as they were. Her father had always emphasised how easy it was to find oneself on the wrong side of the fence. It wasn’t necessarily a question of who had the quickest wits or the firmest resolve. It wasn’t always about bravery or some shining inner goodness. It could just as easily be about the position of your name in the alphabet, the chemistry of your blood, or whether you were fortunate enough to be the daughter of a man who happened to own a ship.

She forced herself not to push through the crowds of people waiting to be processed, doing her best to ease forward politely, making eye contact and apologies, smiling at and tolerating those who did not immediately step out of her way. But the mob—she could not help but think of them as such in spite of her best intentions—was so large, so collectively stupid, that her patience only lasted for about two decks. Then something inside her snapped and she was pushing through with all her strength, teeth gritted, oblivious to the insults and the spitting that followed in her wake.

She finally made it through the crowds and descended three blissfully deserted levels using interdeck ladders and stairwells. She moved in near darkness, navigating from one erratic light source to the next, cursing herself for not bringing a torch. Then her shoes sloshed through an inch of something wet and sticky she was glad she couldn’t see.

Finally she found a functioning main-spine elevator and operated the control to summon it. The ship’s lean was disturbingly apparent—it was part of the problem for the continued processing of the immigrants—but so far main ship functions did not appear to have been affected. She heard the elevator thundering towards her, clattering against its inductance rails, and took a moment to check the neutrino levels on her wrist unit. Assuming that the planetwide monitors could still be trusted, the ship was now only five or six per cent from drive criticality. Once that threshold was reached, the ship would have enough bottled energy to lift itself from the surface of Ararat and into orbit.

Only five or six per cent. There had been times when the neutrino flux had jumped that much in only a few minutes.

“Take your time, John,” she said. “None of us are in that much of a hurry.”

The elevator was slowing. It arrived in a self-important flutter of clanking mechanisms. The doors opened, fluid sluicing down the shaft as Antoinette stepped into the waiting emptiness of the elevator car. Again, why had she forgotten to bring a light with her? She was getting sloppy, taking it as read that the Captain would usher her into his realm like a familiar house guest.
Come on in. Put your feet up. How’re things?

What if, this time, he was not so enthusiastic about having company?

None of the elevator voice-control systems worked properly. With practised ease Antoinette unlatched an access panel, exposing the manual controls. Her fingers dithered over the options. They were annotated in antiquated script, but she was familiar enough with them by now. This elevator would only take her part of the way down to the Captain’s usual haunts. She would have to change to another at some point, which would mean a cross-ship trek of at least several hundred metres, assuming no blockades had materialised along the way since her last visit. Would it be better to go up first, and take a different spine track down? For a moment the possibilities branched, Antoinette acutely aware that this time, literally, a minute here or there might make all the difference.

But then the elevator started moving. She had done nothing to it.

“Hello, John,” she said.

The shuttle loitered over First Camp.

The sun was almost down. In the last, miserly light of the day, Vasko and his companions watched the green-clad spire slip beyond the headland. The towering thing had cast its own slanted shadow in the final minutes of daylight, a shadow that moved not just with the descent of the sun but also with the changing position and tilt of the ship. The movement was almost too slow to make out from moment to moment. It was like watching the hour hand of a clock: the movement was only really apparent when you looked away for a minute or two. But the ship
was
moving, being dragged along by that cloak of biomass, and now a tongue of land stood between the ship and the bay. It was not much of a tongue, just the last hundred metres of headland, and surely not enough to completely deflect the anticipated tidal waves; but it was bound to make some difference, and as the ship moved further along its course the sheltering effect would become larger and larger.

“Did she make it aboard?” Khouri asked, her eyes wide and unfocused. Aura seemed to be sleeping again, Khouri once more speaking for herself alone.

“Yes,” Vasko said.

“I hope she can talk some sense into him.”

“What happened back there . . .” Vasko said. He looked at her, waiting for her to say something, but nothing came. “When Aura spoke to us . . . ?”

“Yes?”

“That was really her, right?”

Khouri looked at him, one eye slightly narrowed. “Does that bother you? Does my daughter disturb you?”

“I just want to know. She’s sleeping now, isn’t she?”

“She isn’t in my head, no.”

“But she was?”

“Where are you going with this, Malinin?”

“I want to know how it works,” he said. “I think she might be useful to us. She’s already helped us, but that’s only the start, isn’t it?”

“I told you already,” Khouri said, “Aura knows stuff. We just have to listen.”

 

Hela, 2727

 

Rashmika sat alone in her room, the night after the caravan had crossed the bridge. She opened the little metal canister that Pietr had given her with trembling hands, fearing—despite herself—some deception or trick. But there was nothing in the canister except a rolled-up spool of thin yellow paper. It slid into her hands, the colour of tobacco. She flattened it carefully, and then inspected the faint sequences of grey marks on one side of the paper.

To the untrained eye they meant precisely nothing. At first they reminded her a little of something, and she had to think for a while before it came to her. The spaced vertical dashes—clustered and clumped, but sliding closer and closer together as her eye panned from left to right—brought to mind a diagram of the chemical absorption lines in a star’s spectrum, bunching closer and closer towards a smeared continuum of states. But these lines represented individual vanishings, and the smeared continuum lay in the future. But what exactly did it signify? Would the vanishings become the norm, with Haldora stuttering in and out of reality like a defective light fitting? Or would the planet just vanish, popping out of existence for evermore?

She examined the paper again. There was a second sequence of marks above the other. They agreed closely, except at one point where the lower sequence had an additional vertical mark where none was present above it.

Twenty-odd years ago, Pietr had said.

Twenty-odd years ago, Haldora had winked out of existence for one and one-fifth of a second. A long cosmic blink. Not just a moment of divine inattention, but a fully-fledged deific snooze.

And during that absence, something had happened that the churches did not like. Something that might even have been worth the life of a harmless old man.

She looked at the paper again, and for the first time it occurred to Rashmika to wonder why Pietr had given it to her, and what she was meant to do with it.

 

Ararat, 2675

 

The elevator had been descending for several minutes when Antoinette felt a lurch as it shifted from its usual track. She cried out at first, thinking the elevator was about to crash, but the ride continued smoothly for a dozen seconds before she felt another series of jolts and swerves as the car switched routes again. There was no guessing where she was, only that she was deep inside the ship. Perhaps she was even below the waterline, in the last few hundred metres of the submerged hull. Any maps she might have brought along with her—not that she had, of course—would have been totally useless by now. It was not only that these dank levels were difficult to access from the upper decks, but that they were prone to convulsive and confusing changes of local architecture. For a long time it had been assumed that the elevator lines remained stable when all else changed, but Antoinette knew that this was not the case, and that it would be futile to attempt to navigate by apparently familiar reference points. If she’d brought an inertial compass and a gravitometer she might have been able to pinpoint her position to within a few dozen metres in three-dimensional space . . . but she hadn’t, and so she had no choice but to trust the Captain.

The elevator arrived at its destination. The door opened and the last dregs of fluid spilled out. She tapped her shoes dry, feeling the unpleasant wetness of her trouser hems against the skin of her calves. She was really not dressed for a meeting with the Captain. What would he think?

She looked out and had to suppress an involuntary gasp of surprise and delight. For all that she knew every moment was precious, it was impossible not to be moved by the view she was seeing. Deep in the ship as she was, she had been expecting another typically gloomy, damp enclosure. She had been assuming that the Captain would manifest via the manipulation of local junk or one of the distorting wall surfaces. Or something else, but qualitatively similar.

But the Captain had brought her somewhere else entirely. It was a huge chamber, a place that at first glance appeared not to have any limits at all. There was an endless sky above her, shaded a rich, heraldic blue. In all directions she saw only stepped tiers of trees reaching away into blue-green infinity. There was a lovely fragrant breeze and a cackle of animal life from the high branches of the nearest trees. Below her, accessed by a meandering rustic wooden staircase, was a marvellous little glade. There was a pool off to one side being fed by a hissing waterfall. The water in the pool, except where it was stirred into creamy whiteness under the waterfall, was the exquisite black of space. Rather than suggesting taintedness, the blackness of the water made it look wonderfully cool and inviting. A little way in from the water’s edge, resting on the perfectly tended lawn, was a wooden table. On either side of the table, forming benches, were long logs.